Maria Headley is a 20-year-old New York University film student who lives in an outer-borough apartment with two roommates, her cat and the occasional cockroach. Her life is on a bit of a downward spiral. She doesn’t have a room of her own, she’s working temp jobs between classes and the carefully selected men she dates are driving her nuts – but not in a good way.
By Valentine’s Day – when a man calls and wakes her up with the line, “I’m listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out?” – Headley is at her wit’s end. She immediately decides she needs coffee, more sleep and better judgment with men. After careful contemplation, she decides to take her own judgmental taste out of the dating equation, vowing to date anyone and everyone who asks her out over the next year. Her decision to let fate handle her love life fuels her memoir, “The Year of Yes,” a book as quirky and outrageous as it is heartfelt and honest.
Previous to her “year of yes,” Headley’s dating rules were intensely specific and a bit extreme: no carnivores, no bankers, no truckers, no lawyers, no construction workers, no firemen, no Goths, no taxi drivers, no mimes and no Republicans. She also discriminated against men with blond eyelashes and men in tight jeans.
During her “year of yes,” these standards fly out the window and she manages to date quite a few men she would have dismissed in the past.
Without her usual guidelines, Headley embarks on the dating journey of the century in the dating Mecca of New York City. With her prime location, Headley has no shortage of dates. She spends a chilly fall day swimming on Coney Island with an old subway conductor and his sombrero-wearing iguana, Stan.
After tripping over a homeless man on the street, she buys him lunch and listens to stories about his life as a rock star; he thinks he is Jimi Hendrix. Baler, a bicyclist from Cyprus, asks her out and then brazenly requests that she bite him – down there. And speaking of down there, Headley also goes on a date with Jarzhe, a short, balding tech boom millionaire who asks her to marry him, licks her eyeball and proceeds to introduce her to God (his penis) in the apartment he shares with his mother.
In the next 12 months, Headley also swaps spit with Marilyn Manson and gets tangled in the sheets with a neighborhood dog walker who marks his territory on every attractive woman in sight. A lesbian asks her to carry her baby; a mime asks her to marry him and then dumps her on a subway platform without uttering a single word.
Each dating adventure is filled with more jaw dropping details than the one before it, made possible by Headley’s frank and honest retelling of her “year of yes.” She doesn’t have any qualms about broadcasting her dates’ endearing quirks and bizarre sexual requests. Nor does she hide her own flaws like her desire for a married man or her multiple drunken escapades and one-night stands.
Arriving just in time for Valentine’s Day and people making belated New Year’s resolutions, “The Year of Yes” is the perfect prescription for a broken heart, the eternal pessimist and anyone who fears what life has to offer when they start saying, “Yes.”